Visions of Tomorrow, Alec Nevada-Lee Astounding

  I have finished reading Astounding, Alec Nevada-Lee's book on John W. Campbell and some of the writers most associated with Astounding, Isaac Asimov,  Robert A, Heinlein, and L. Ron. Hubbard. It was a good read, but fair warning, all four were deeply flawed individuals, though often in different ways. I had been following Alec's blog for years, so this came as no surprise to me. That said, Asimov and especially Heinlein were important authors to me when I began reading science fiction and the accounts of their death did make that child in me feel a bit sad, even though the works I remembered them for were written decades before they passed away. Also "Twilight" and "Who Goes There" by Campbell, writing as Don A. Stuart, remain two of my favourite science fiction stories. Alec's book delivered what it promised, an understanding of John W. Campbell's influence in the field for good or ill. Some of the behaviour mentioned in the book is chilling, so if you would like to read something a little more upbeat about Astounding, it's authors and the science fiction of the period I will make some suggestions below.

I did want to pass along two items related to Alec's research for the book. From his website:

"And I can reveal now that this was all in preparation for a more ambitious project that has been in the works for a while—a visual essay on the art of Astounding and Unknown that has finally appeared online in the New York Times Book Review, with the highlights scheduled to be published in the print edition this weekend. It took a lot of time and effort to put it together, especially by my editors, and I’m very proud of the result, which honors the visions of such artists as H.W. Wesso, Howard V. Brown, Hubert Rogers, Manuel Rey Isip, Frank Kelly Freas, and many others. It stands on its own, but I’ve come to think of it as an unpublished chapter from my book that deserves to be read alongside its longer companion. As I note in the article, it took years for the stories inside the magazine to catch up to the dreams of its readers, but the artwork was often remarkable from the beginning. And if you want to know what the fans of the golden age really saw when they imagined the future, the answer is right here."

https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/visions-of-tomorrow/

Link to the (wonderful)  New York Times Book Review article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/books/review/astounding-science-fiction-magazine.html

In his year end review Alec also notes "that I saw John W. Campbell’s Frozen Hell, based on the original manuscript of “Who Goes There?” that I rediscovered at Harvard, blow past all expectations on Kickstarter. (The book, which will include introductions by me and Robert Silverberg, is scheduled to appear in June.) " 

Full post here: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/the-last-resolution/

Kickstarter (closed) information:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wildsidepress/frozen-hell-the-book-that-inspired-the-thing

  

Wildside Press will be selling copies:

http://wildsidepress.com/kickstarter-project-international-backers/

And as promised, some other titles about Astounding and it's authors. Bud Webster's Past Masters, a number of his essays can also be found online, see my Handy Resources. The other items are out of print as far as I know. 

A Requiem for Astounding (1964) 

A very detailed look at Astounding by an early fan.

Two titles by Sam Moskowitz, a fairly feisty (polarizing?) member of First Fandom. But he did seem to know everyone and claimed to have read pretty much everything.  I do enjoy his profiles, and it is nice to hear from someone who actually knew at least some of the early science fiction writers.

 

 Cover credits:

Photo one L-R, Hubert Rogers, Rogers, Rogers

Photo two, design Ploy Sirpant, illustration Travis Coburn

Photo three L-R, Rogers, Howard V. Brown, H.W. Scott, Wesso

Photo four L-R, Timmins, Kelly Freas, Freas

Who Goes There?, Richard Powers 

Golden Age Optimism and the Lords of the Starship

  "Yes,"Getting the country back on its feet," is the usual phrase. Although I am, at times, quite confounded as to how I am to recreate a world that I know nothing about and one which might"—Limpkins's voice dropped slightly—"exist only in legend." (15)

"But the ship's primary purpose will not be one of simple transportation, but that of a Cause, the thing about which all of the dormant hopes of our nation can crystallize.
"And here is the trick: the ship will betray the people for their own good."(26)

Lords of the Starship

As I enter my 60's, I realize I have been reading SF for what must be approaching 50 years. I started with SF intended for children in my school library in Windsor. Titles that spring to mind, John Keir Cross's The Angry Planet or Miss Pickerell On the Moon, she also goes to Mars. I graduated to Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov's robots and Ray Bradbury, who I loved, still do, but even then he was a bit of an outlier, what after all was I to make, as a white kid who lived across from a Detroit in flames, of "The Black and White Game" (1945) from The Golden Apples of the Sun.

 Even at the time many of the titles were old, although I was oblivious to this, even after reading Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo with its Nazi base on the moon. I did not realize that these books and their visions of the future were often 15 to 20+ years old. SF was by no means my only reading, as a geeky kid, books were a refuge, myths, mysteries, historical novels aimed at teens, adventure stories, even the occasional sports novel were gist for the mill, although SF has remained my greatest love.

As I look for like minded enthusiasts on the web, I have been interested in reading about their youthful experiences with SF. One I found was the late Bud Webster, who I have mentioned before on my blog. A link to his columns on SF authors and anthologies appears under Handy Resources, I recommend starting with Anthopology 101: The Best of Time and Space

"But the library was sanctuary for me. Nobody would chase me, nobody would yell at me, and best of all, nobody there would rag me for reading books. I'd have stayed there forever if I could have. It was quiet, cool, and it's where I became addicted to books, both as artifacts and because of the content.

I was probably all of nine years old when I first found the thick, heavy collections of stories edited by Conklin and Healy & McComas for the first time. But there they were, that pair of behemoths: Adventures in Time and Space (ed. Raymond J. Healy and Francis McComas, Random House 1946) and The Best of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin, Crown 1946). They changed my life, and without a doubt altered the way I read science fiction, and I wasn't the only one."

http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_03.html

Another fellow reader is  James Harris with his blog Auxillary Memory and his great lists of SF by the decade. I have enjoyed many of this posts but I think his post, Who Still Reads 1950's Science Fiction is a great start, capturing his thoughts on SF. His comment 

"The kind of reader I’m trying to identify is different. Science fiction was their childhood religion, born again into faith in the future, like the theological have a faith in the past. " 

is one I want to discuss more in a future post.

https://auxiliarymemory.com/2016/07/12/who-still-reads-1950s-science-fiction/

But the main impetus for my current post is a post by Ralph E. Vanghan, discussing the effect reading Lords of the Starship by Mark S. Geston had on him. What struck a chord with me was this quote,

"At the time, I was a futurist. I did not really think I would see flying cars by the Year 2000 (though I hoped so), I did believe that the ills of the world would be solved through technology and science, that starving millions would be fed by scientific farming, that the world would embrace peace once everyone's standard of living had been raised by ubiquitous technology and that the the frontier of human experience would be expanded by colonization of the solar system and journeys to the stars beyond. Unfortunately, the future turned out not to be quite what I had envisioned. I'm no longer a futurist, not even much of an optimist anymore, and quite often I find myself thinking, Where are we going so fast"


http://bookscribbles.blogspot.ca/



I don't think I considered SF my childhood religion, and like Ralph I did not have a time table for the delivery of my flying car but like Ralph i did think science and technology would begin to improve the lives of people worldwide. That a rational approach would break down the barriers of social status, nationalism and race. This idea could be found in science fiction. Arthur C, Clarke was one of its greatest proponents, in the Deep Range we not only farm the oceans, but learn a deeper connection to other species. In his non-fiction books like The Exploration of Space or novels like The Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust mankind begins the often perilous exploration of the solar system. 

But the SF I read was not always a literature of optimism, Heinlein saw us repeating the errors that lead to the American Revolution in The Red Planet, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and a personal favourite Between Planets, even in his more optimistic Farmer in the Sky, the colonists on Ganymede discuss the fact that the overpopulated Earth will want to send too many new colonists, but are told that the inevitable war on Earth will prevent this. Like many SF writers, Andre Norton embraces a cyclical view of history, with civilization repeatedly rising and falling. In Star Rangers the Galactic Empire is collapsing. Nuclear war has occurred in both Sea Siege and Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. The Stars Are Ours sees a persecuted band of "Free Scientists " escape a tyrannical police state for space and even when we get out into the universe we are relegated to acting as mercenaries in Star Guard.

  

In Asimov's Foundation, the most optimistic outcome is a Dark Age lasting 1,000 years rather than 30,000 years and Lathan Devers the trader, instrumental in saving the Foundation, in Foundation and Empire, later dies in its slave mines. Ray Bradbury offers us the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 or the Mars of the Martian Chronicles in which, in a parallel to the settling of the Americas, the native Martians are eventually wiped out by contact with the Earthlings, who then launch a nuclear war on Earth.

My feeling of optimism, now largely lost, came from the world itself. My wife a few years younger than myself and also a SF reader said the same thing when I asked her. My father and my uncles on both sides of the family had gone from poor farm boys in the depression, into military service in WWII, and had come home to steady jobs in the trades or factories of southern Ontario. (Canada also had a version of the GI bill which provided money for education, low-cost mortgages and  businesses loans.)

  The interstate highway system in the USA started in 1956 and similar infrastructure projects were carried out in Canada. The post war economic expansion lead to sustained economic growth, high levels of employment, the expansion of the suburbs and what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Capitalism. (see link below) Vaccines and improved public health practices and screening meant polio, TB and more exotic diseases like smallpox were eradicated or at least controlled. (I spent a year as an infant in a sanatorium being treated for TB, this was a big deal) Yes there were the race riots of 1967 and the Vietnam war, but also the anti-war and civil rights movements and even a bit of environmental consciousness (in elementary school I wrote an essay on the pollution of Lake Erie). In Canada, 1967 was the Canadian Centenary featuring the Expo 67 World's Fair. (One year later my wife's family would move into their new house, which actually had running water, another big deal during winters in the Canadian Prairies). 

  The first news event I remember watching on TV was the landing of Alan Shepard after his suborbital flight in May 1961 as part of Project Mercury, and I had a plastic space centre with rockets, a launch pad and missile launching platform. How and Why books told us about the sciences.  We could collect cards from tea leaf packages with pictures about trees, birds, animals and the exploration of space and the oceans. The world, even the solar system was our oyster. A rational approach and advances in science and technology would lead us to a bright future. Things were not perfect at that time, not in North America, and certainly not in the world. But the way seemed clear. 

Now that short period of unsustainable prosperity after WWII has engendered some oddly selective nostalgia on the part of a lot of people and the possibility for a bright new science-fictional future seems more remote every day. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_economic_expansion

SF may have shown me a variety of possibilities, both good and bad, but it was the apparent progress we were makings as a race that gave me hope for the future.

"he learned of asphalt roads that had once covered the world, and of the vehicles that had carried man upon them; ships that dived into the seas, and ships that had carried other men on some few faltering steps towards the stars, before there was no more time for such things." (40)

Out of the Mouth of the Dragon, by Mark S. Geston

This might have been he future we envisioned but with bigger televisions.

http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166983919784/futurehouse?utm_campaign=SharedPost&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=TumblriOS


In Part Two I will give my thoughts on Lords of the Starship by Mark S. Geston.

    Some time ago it occurred to me that I was buying far more books than I was reading, much less discussing and reflecting on. Part of the reason is that I enjoy books not just as text, but as physical objects with bindings, fonts, print runs and cover artists. I also see science fiction books as historic artifacts reflecting politics, society, science, current conditions and future extrapolations all changing over time. They move from religious allegories, to utopias, lost race, planetary romances, time travel, alternate history, juveniles. The atomic age, and cold war paranoia are followed by hard science fiction, feminist science fiction, anthropological science fiction, new wave, cyber punk, mainstream science fiction and post colonial science fiction all merging with and informing each other. And then you have the outliers like Cordwainer Smith, stories or authors that seem to come out of no where and disappear the same way, like fireflies that flash for only a moment, So when I have spare time or money or both I buy books this means I also read about the books, the authors and the historical trends they represent. Add to this the ever present social media which saps my time and energy and demonstrates very clearly that many of us are determined to replicate the science fiction dystopia as our preferred political model (hence it’s absence for the list above) and I realize I have not been reading enough.

   So I have brought a number of books to the cabin, some “classic” works or important authors I have never read and some old friends. I have also tried to incorporate more female authors, Canadian authors, and Russian authors. Given that the cabin already contained some volumes of Gunn’s excellent The Road to Science Fiction and The Science Fiction Hall of Fame I am well served. By design this grouping does not contain a great deal of very current SF. Bud Webster the great science fiction historian/ fan/writer used to talk about how he was a geeky, some what picked on kid, looking for the refuge when he found it in the science fiction section of the public library and the books of Raymond J. Healy, Groff Conklin, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton and others. 

 “But the library was sanctuary for me. Nobody would chase me, nobody would yell at me, and best of all, nobody there would rag me for reading books. I'd have stayed there forever if I could have. It was quiet, cool, and it's where I became addicted to books, both as artifacts and because of the content.

I was probably all of nine years old when I first found the thick, heavy collections of stories edited by Conklin and Healy & McComas for the first time. But there they were, that pair of behemoths: Adventures in Time and Space (ed. Raymond J. Healy and Francis McComas, Random House 1946) and The Best of Science Fiction (ed. Groff Conklin, Crown 1946). They changed my life, and without a doubt altered the way I read science fiction, and I wasn't the only one.”

Anthopology 101: The Best of Time and Space, by Bud Webster

I was that kid's twin living in a different city and country but holding the same books in a similar library. I want to see if I can find him again, (okay maybe a bit less geeky). So I have chosen books I hope will help on that journey, Later today I will raise a beer to toast Bud and see how I do.

Bud Webster (1952-2016)

 This summer I was at the cabin which meant I did not post as much as I had planned. It also meant that I did not order lots of books from ABE because I did not have room to bring them back what with our tools, my wife's telescope and 3 dogs. There was also the possibility of a postal strike which curbed my enthusiasm. So I did something almost as fun, agonized endlessly about my first order. When these obstacles were out of the way, I was interested in four volumes of Ballantine's six volume series by William Tenn, published in 1968.

For lovely photos of all six volumes see the great SF blog unsubscrbedblog.

https://unsubscribedblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/a-william-tenn-reader/

Another potential purchase was the first five volumes of the Alpha anthologies edited by Silverberg, Bud Webster has been my go to authority on anthologies since I first stumbled across his essays on the web (link below) so I did some googling. 

It was then I learned that Bud had passed away in Feb. 2016. Bud was not much older than I am and one thing that had attracted me to his essays on anthologies and important
SF authors was that many were books and writers important to me in my youth. The portrait he painted of himself as a bookish boy disinterested in sports who saw the library as a safe and welcoming place and SF as it's greatest attraction was also familiar to me.

I have have read, bought and accumulated SF most of my life, but my focus has changed over the years. I collected small press but they got expensive, pulps largely for the covers but I have run out of room to display them and I will not buy them to keep them in boxes. A number of the blogs I currently follow focus on 1960's and 1970's SF and I have been using them to point me to authors and works I have missed.

However my first love was always the Sf short story, thanks Ray, so Bud was a revelation. All the information I could possibly want on anthology series in one place. I started with
the bricks (heavy books) as he described them Adventures in Time and Space by by Healy & McComas and many of Groff Conklin's including the enormous hardcovers The Best of Science
Fiction, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Treasury of Science Fiction, Omnibus of Science Fiction. while I my wife and I had some anthologies especially Wollheim' Best of anthologies, many edited by Bleiler, Dikty, Merril, Pohl, Silverberg, Knight, Carr, Aldiss Harrison, Carnell etc. have followed. To avoid wallowing in nostalgia I have collected current best of series by editors like Gardner Dozois and the late David Hartwell as well.

I did buy the Alpha as for the Tenn's, well lets ask Bud.

"Not that it matters, really, since I was an ardent fan of William Tenn from whenever I first ran across him. I recall clearly the plans I had for my weekly pay when I was sixteen and delivering papers in the hills around Roanoke. I had a long list of albums (Mothers of Invention, Electric Prunes, Yardbirds and other soft-rock hits) and books I wanted to buy, and among them was the lovely little matched six-volume set of William Tenn stories that Ballantine brought out in 1968. I had to get them one at a time, as they came out, but I was proud of that little row of books and I showed them off to my other sf-reading friends."

from Past Masters, In a Klass By Himself (or, Tops On a Scale of One to Tenn)

by Bud Webster

Thanks Bud

More information and links on Bud Webster follow and you will read more about Bud's influence and the anthologies he lead me to in future posts.

"Bud Webster lived surrounded by more than 10,000 books, from ratty, dog-eared paperbacks to rare, signed first editions. There were books in every room except the smallest ones, and occasionally (like Scrooge McDuck) he liked to gather them all in a pile in the middle of the floor, toss them up in the air, and let them come down and hit him on the head. A columnist for the SFWA Bulletin and frequent contributor to the "Curiosities" page of F&SF, he was the author of 41 Above the Rest: An Index and Checklist for the Anthologies of Groff Conklin, the definitive bio-bibliography on the subject, as well as The Joy of Booking: Webster's Guide to Buying and Selling Used SF and Fantasy Books. He also wrote fiction, but not nearly often enough to suit Mary, his Significant Other. He lived in Richmond, Virginia, with the long-suffering Mary and three damn cats."

Sadly Bud died in February 2016 - he will be sorely missed but his memory will live on in the columns below and his writings elsewhere

from http://www.philsp.com/articles/webster_index.html

This links also provides links to pdf's of many of his columns.

For more information on Bud Webster the following link is also useful.

http://file770.com/?p=27560

New Arrivals

Saturday I was able to stop by one of the Fair's 

Fair bookstores in Calgary. The number of used books  

stores here have really declined over the years, but 

this small family run chain combines a number of 

locations with excellent service. It is so nice 

 to buy in person to avoid shipping costs, to actually 

handle the books and run into items on the shelf you 

did not know you needed until you have them 

in your hand

My haul included a number of anthologies, one, 

a nice copy of Conklin's Great Science Fiction by Scientists.

 Anthologies have always been of interest but since reading

 Bud Webster's articles on collecting anthologies,

 see them in the links under Handy Resources on the right

 or buy his book Anthopology 101, they have become 

something of an obsession.

I also got a copy of the Dick novel with a cover 

I really wanted, a fairly risqué cover for Thomas 

Burnett Swann an author I normally associate with  

minotaurs and fauns, and intriguing novels by Mark S. 

Geston and Michael G Coney which fell into the category of 

impulse buys.

And who can resist a horror anthology with a beautiful 

Richard Powers cover. The authors have a nice SF feel 

including Matheson, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, Kutter and 

Robert Moore Williams. An exceptional trip.